samoyeddogs

April 10, 2013.  Mad journal.  Get your mad here.  Pouring rain through morning and now it has cleared up.  Windy, cool, but not cold.  The garden here on the upper deck is in bud.  Just back from the computer store I was in Saturday because I finally remembered that this must have been the place, this parking lot, where I abutted the front end of the car up against one of these concrete curb thingys and somehow managed to tear off my front license plate without noticing.  I only noticed yesterday that the plate was missing and have spent the last three days trying to remember how and where this could have happened.  It was some place I don’t usually go, I knew that.  And then I remembered.  It was Simply Computing, a place I’ve only been to twice in the last five years.  They have their own parking behind the building and there was a spot there and I pulled in and on the downward sloping slot inched forward a bit too far, as can happen, and I thought it was just the plastic guard thing under the front bumper that had got slightly hung-up, and I put the car in reverse and backed up about a foot.  If a license plate falls in the parking lot does anybody hear?  Today the plate was nowhere to be found.  I went into the store and they didn’t have it.  No matter.  Monday we’re sending this car on a one way ticket to the Fraser River.  Enough is enough.

April 9 2013.  Rain.  A cool spring and a cool afternoon.  I get the call and go, the four to eleven.  The usual grisly slog and for what?  For the hundred bucks, youth.  It’s sad.  The security guard shows me the little jack-knife slasher he’s taken to carrying.  He tells me he’s been called as a witness for a mug facing charges downtown including for an attempted armed robbery here last summer.  The dolt’s little crime spree included pepper-spraying a gas station attendant that night before he came in here, and then some other piece of idiocy, I can’t remember precisely what, after he left here with no money.  Who are these people?  This perp was white, male, middle-aged with a medium build.  The till jockey, a she, hasn’t been back since this individual stuck a gun in her face.

April 8, 2013.  Should I contact these clowns that sent me a card nearly a year ago telling me they looked forward to reading my submission, but please be patient?  This is an issue.  Just how patient do we need to be around here and what if we’ve spent most of our lives being patient and it’s made no difference?  It’s like the people who’ve said to me:  You’re a good guy, Esteban.  And they’re right.  I am.  But what good has it done me?  I mean, look at me.  Being good has afforded me nothing.  And what, anyway, would be the motivation to be patient any longer either?  Is it not wiser to reflect on the distinct possibility that, as already experienced once with this outfit, and it is a well-known outfit, my submission, which they asked for mind you, has been booted, dumped, barbecued, shredded, misplaced, thrown away, stomped on, lost?  Nobody has a year to sit around on your pleasure, youth, whether you reside in Toronto or anywhere else.  Serious get.  So it continues daft.  I spit on the memory of my literary ambition.  “It is all a darkness”.

April 2, 2013.  Guestworker, airport.  What?  I said guestworker, airport.  The guestworker doesn’t query.  The guestworker goes where the guestworker is needed.  The guestworker goes because the guestworker needs.  The guestworker does not like being needy, but the guestworker is.

So.  Stand around in a wind tunnel ten hours.  Well, a wind tunnel, yes.  What the hell it’s an airport, isn’t it?  No planes come flying through, just buses, taxis, limos and vans.  It’s a service industry scene.  And the baggage cart wallahs wrangling long trains of baggage carts from their collection points back to the International Reception Lounge (IRL), pulling them along riding an electric-powered buggy through the so-called VIP entrance-exit.  It’s a fairly dingy wind tunnel around here, that never sees the light of day.  It’s cold and the concrete is cold, the asphalt is black and there’s a surprising number of cig butts lying around despite the no-smoking signs.  This tunnel could use a bath.  Where are the pressure-washer wallahs?  The walls are dirty and so is the floor.  Very VIP.  But the people are friendly.  There isn’t much for us to do but that doesn’t matter.  We’re here.  We’re on station.  At our posts.  And we don’t care a hoot for nothing.

April 4, 2013.  That was the week that wasn’t.  Paid handsomely for doing not very much at all and axed two days early but paid out in full.  In the aggregate, closer to what I’m truly worth, guestworking or otherwise.  My valuable time, which is all I have.  It was an interesting few days in Airport City, all told, but I’ve enjoyed better pizza.  The seating arrangements were excellent.

March 26, 2013.  Mad Journal.  For the mad, by the mad.  Let’s review.  There’s no tooth fairy.  Your experience is worth nothing.  You’re not special, and everything isn’t going to be okay.  And if someone could help you, wouldn’t they have shown up by now?  So forget it.  There’s no magic wand, no words and no mercy.  And the skin on your elbows is peeling in the aftermath.  Whenever you think things can’t get any worse you open another door and there’s a new staircase, leading down.  You think:  If I get through this nothing will ever bother me again.  But there’s no end to this.  You’re locked in a hard-scrabble existence you never imagined in any of your fantasies.  The difference this time is you don’t know how to fix it.  There’s no situation, no cliché, no correct number of servings of fruits and vegetables that can save you.  You’ve been outed and you’re a loser.  It’s hard.  There’s no grace.  Grace got deported.

So go ahead.  Go through the motions.  Pretend.  Act like nothing’s happened.  You’re still you, right?  Even if it’s not the you you wanted.  You hoo!  It’s still you!  Hello!  You’re still beautiful.  You’re a thing of beauty.  Don’t worry about it.

Take the air.  It’s not a bad day.  Yesterday you survived a four hour briefing and, in spite of everything, today is a good day to be alive.  One more day.  Just one more day and you can fix this thing.  Give yourself a chance.  Renew that library book.  Don’t go into debt to the library.  They’ll come and beat your head in.  Librarians are hard people.  Take it easy.

March 29.  Good Friday.  What’s good about it?  Just about everything.  You nix going out except for groceries and now are in process of soothing the spirit with a nice cheese soufflé you’ve got on the bubble.  The skin is peeling off your hands and you are battling back with deluxe hand cream to combat the dryness.  This goop’s got everything in it except morphine.  The fingers love it.

So the clock rolls and you head into your dumb-ass job.  You are buoyed, somewhat, by the thought that each time you do this it’s one less time you will have to do this.  That’s philosophy for you.  Take a picture.  You’re on the two to nine-thirty and it passes without incident.  No shootings, no stabbings, no grab and dash artistry, no ignorant peasantry out to light your fuse.  The peasants, it seems, have taken the night off.  Good for them. You get through.  Back home the scab about the size of a dime on your lower back the last month finally peels off.  You did nothing wrong and it doesn’t matter.

March 30.  Easter Sunday.  I find a car under the straw of my Easter basket after taking all the candy eggs and little chocolate bunnies out.  But this isn’t a dream of my childhood, is it?  A little plastic car, two-tone, orange body, black roof, just what I wanted.  What ever happened to that car?  There always used to be some sort of additional little treat under the straw of your own, personal Easter basket Easter morning.  If you were lucky.  If you’d been good.

Mad Journal.  March 15, 2013. “For Brutus, only, overcame himself.  And no man else hath honour by his death.”  Did you say you had 18 rejections, ape?  That’s tragic.  Tell you what.  Why don’t you get back to us when it’s 180?  Maybe we can look into it.  The whole world’s in a terrible state of crisis, ape.  If it’s 18 it’s 18.  If it was a youth and not simply a record of your failure rate it wouldn’t even be able to vote yet!  So overcome, my simian friend.  Overcome!  You know what?  Maybe “Wilderness Park” ain’t so hot.  Maybe it’s not all you’re cracking it up to be.  Maybe it’s a disorganized, criminal mess and you don’t have the stones, like a real cop, to do anything about it.  Maybe you’re out there in that park of yours, yourself, lost.

March 16, 2013.  That’s right.  Mad Journal.  Upper deck.  Home office.  Five PM.  Get out of here.  A bit of breeze is rattling the glass in the railing outside there as I enter these immortal words.

I remember hearing that sound the first time I came here when we were looking at the place, that kind of lonely, lost sound, perfect for melancholics, that little rattle rattle rattle, like a lost ghost.  Because except for the distant sound of traffic on the bridge going downtown, this is a quiet place, which is why you can hear that.  And pretty private too.  And that must have been why we moved in.

The suite was an estate sale and the owner had ended his own life right here in this upstairs bedroom, apparently.  We never, uh, made too many enquiries, but that was the story.  Downstairs that afternoon I remember there wasn’t much furniture in the suite.  Most of it had already been moved out.  There were two large, framed paintings on the small living room’s walls.  One was a print of “Scotland Forever” and I can’t remember what the other one was. I think it was a naval theme, HMS Victory or some such.  I remember feeling proud of myself that I knew that print was a print of “Scotland Forever” and also that the original had been painted many years after the scene it depicts, the charge of the “Scots Greys” at the battle of Waterloo (June 18, 1815), and that a woman had painted it, which has always struck me and probably a great lot of other people down the long years, as remarkable, considering the era, and that the original was much larger than this print.  That’s right.  The sun never sets.

The dead guy had been in his forties or so and lived alone.  You see what happens when you start to think about things, when something triggers a memory?  Do we get that we get it, mein apen?  We are sentient, living beings and we remember. Sometimes memory is all we have, which isn’t much when you’re stuck here, day after day after year trying to understand and I mean understand.  And what you understand is that, ultimately, there is no understanding.  There just is, and isn’t.  And it can get painful beating yourself up over it.  So stop that.